00:00:00What do you mean anti-human?
00:00:01- So let's dive into this.
00:00:05So there's something in economics called the resource curse.
00:00:10So think countries like Venezuela or Sudan,
00:00:14where you discover that that country is sitting on top
00:00:17of a really valuable resource like oil.
00:00:19And then once a bunch of your GDP comes from oil
00:00:24and not from the labor or innovation
00:00:27or development of your people,
00:00:29you invest more in oil infrastructure
00:00:32and not investing in people.
00:00:33You don't invest in education.
00:00:35You don't invest in healthcare
00:00:36because oil is where you get your GDP and your growth from.
00:00:40- Okay. - Okay.
00:00:41This is a well-known fact in economics.
00:00:44It's called the resource curse.
00:00:46There's a wonderful guy named Luke Drago
00:00:48who wrote a piece called "The Intelligence Curse."
00:00:51We are about to enter a world where GDP for countries
00:00:57comes more from data centers and intelligence and AI
00:01:01than is going to come from the labor of human beings.
00:01:04So everyone's talking about
00:01:05how AI is gonna automate all these jobs
00:01:06and then we'll all just like sit back
00:01:08with universal basic income and become painters and poets.
00:01:11And is that actually what's gonna happen?
00:01:13Or when countries get almost all of their revenue from AI
00:01:18and a smaller and smaller percentage from people,
00:01:22do they have an incentive to invest in childcare,
00:01:26healthcare, education, the wellbeing of their people?
00:01:30Or is it basically just hook them up
00:01:31to the social media addiction economy, keep them busy,
00:01:34while basically all the revenue comes from AI companies?
00:01:37And so what I'm trying to get at is
00:01:40this is not a human future.
00:01:42This is not a future that's in service of regular people.
00:01:45This is a future that's in service
00:01:48of eight soon-to-be trillionaires
00:01:50who will consolidate all the wealth
00:01:52and disempower basically everybody else.
00:01:55Because- - Does that make sense?
00:01:56- It does because previously in order to,
00:02:00go ahead and get that in, it's high powered stuff.
00:02:02- I mean, yeah, this is a big conversation.
00:02:04- Yeah, exactly.
00:02:05They've started a fucking trend.
00:02:07It's so funny when no one in the room wants to crack their can
00:02:11in case it interrupts the conversation.
00:02:12So one goes and it's a Mexican wave of can opens around them.
00:02:15It's good.
00:02:17So previously you would have had to look after the humans,
00:02:21healthcare, education, quality of life.
00:02:23Also tax revenue comes from people, right?
00:02:26- Well, you would have to look after them
00:02:28because they were the primary economic engine.
00:02:31- That's right.
00:02:32- And so they feed themselves.
00:02:33- Yes.
00:02:33- Economically, they feed themselves.
00:02:35- Exactly.
00:02:36- People that are young help to support
00:02:38the people that are old.
00:02:39- That's right.
00:02:39- The ones that are entering the workforce
00:02:40and are driving innovation and are working 40, 60 hour weeks,
00:02:44double jobs, all the rest of it.
00:02:45- Exactly.
00:02:46- And then there's old people who've got 401ks and pensions
00:02:47and shit like that.
00:02:48- Right, right.
00:02:50- Your position is that if we have a world
00:02:53where the human part of the contribution
00:02:56to economic growth and GDP is removed,
00:02:59because it is humans consuming AI,
00:03:01but AI driving and data centers driving the revenue itself,
00:03:06beyond building the data centers, there's very little,
00:03:09and I imagine much of that's done by robots in any case.
00:03:12- Well, we have this joke that most people's occupation
00:03:16in the future we're headed towards with AI
00:03:18is to become a coffin builder.
00:03:20So in other words, your job is to create the thing
00:03:24that replaces you and obsoletes you.
00:03:26So you are essentially building the coffin
00:03:28for your future obsolescence.
00:03:30And so if you're short-term, yes,
00:03:32we need the electricians and the plumbers
00:03:33and we're building data centers.
00:03:34Short-term, yes, you can be a programmer
00:03:37and get the benefit from vibe coding,
00:03:38but then the AIs are learning
00:03:41on all the things that you're doing.
00:03:43And it's taking all the training data
00:03:45of what you're doing with AI,
00:03:46and it's using that to train an AI that can take your job.
00:03:48So everybody using AI now to help them
00:03:50is also training the future AIs
00:03:53that will completely replace them.
00:03:55And again, the explicit goal, this is not my opinion.
00:03:57This is literally the mission statement
00:03:59of all of the AI companies,
00:04:00because the multi-trillion dollar prize
00:04:03at the end of the rainbow of owning the entire world economy
00:04:06is based on building this full replacement economy,
00:04:10because that's what will achieve the greatest growth.
00:04:12And that's why these companies--
00:04:13- Replacement economy?
00:04:14- Yeah, meaning that they're designing
00:04:16to replace all human labor.
00:04:17They're not designing to augment and support
00:04:19and enhance human labor.
00:04:21They're designing to replace all human labor,
00:04:23because that's what justifies the amount of money
00:04:25that they've taken on in debt
00:04:28that they can grow into this total ownership
00:04:31of the entire economy.
00:04:32- What else is there to say about the intelligence costs?
00:04:35- Well, it's just important for people to get
00:04:38that when the AIs are doing
00:04:40all the new scientific research, not humans,
00:04:42you have an automated chemistry lab,
00:04:43you have an automated biology lab,
00:04:45you have an automated surgery.
00:04:47When AI is doing all of that,
00:04:49again, the revenue's gonna come from AI, not from people.
00:04:52And what that means is all the wealth
00:04:54will go to a handful of five AI companies.
00:04:57And then how are you gonna be able to make a living?
00:05:01When in history has a small group of people
00:05:04ever consolidated all the wealth
00:05:06and consciously redistributed it to everyone else?
00:05:09And if you think that might happen in the US,
00:05:11we'll do a universal basic income,
00:05:12just think about the entire world.
00:05:13So right now, you have AIs that are automating,
00:05:15say, customer service jobs.
00:05:17So let's say that that disrupts the Philippines,
00:05:20where 90% of the economy is customer service.
00:05:22I don't know what the number is, it's high.
00:05:25What happens when an entire country's economy
00:05:28gets disrupted by AI?
00:05:29Are a handful of US AI companies going to pay out
00:05:33and support the wellbeing and the livelihoods
00:05:36of all these other people?
00:05:37And then if people don't have money,
00:05:40how are they gonna buy the goods in this future economy
00:05:42where it's all generated by AI?
00:05:44Because now you don't even have an income.
00:05:46So essentially, we're on track to break the entire economy.
00:05:51This is not in the interest of countries.
00:05:55What's confusing to me about this is that
00:05:57I believe it only took something like 20% unemployment
00:06:00for a couple of years
00:06:02to lead to the rise of fascism in Germany.
00:06:05You don't need everyone's job to be automated
00:06:09to get levels of political disruption.
00:06:10I think it was only 20% unemployment
00:06:12that basically led to the French Revolution.
00:06:14There's kind of a mutually assured political revolution
00:06:18that is gonna happen for all these countries
00:06:20that are racing to build AI
00:06:22and deploy it to automate as much labor as possible
00:06:25to compete to boost their external GDP number.
00:06:28The metaphor you can have in your minds is the US and China
00:06:31are essentially racing to take steroids
00:06:33and pumping up the GDP and muscles of their economy
00:06:37while they're getting internal lung failure,
00:06:38internal organ failure, internal brain rot failure
00:06:41because they're governing the internal impact
00:06:44of that technology poorly.
00:06:46So it's a race for external power
00:06:48while internal management of essentially
00:06:50like a failure of your body organs.
00:06:53Does it make sense?
00:06:54- Yeah, what does external power look like in this context?
00:06:57- Well, one of the reasons that people think of AI
00:07:02so important for competition is,
00:07:06if you think about geopolitical competition with China,
00:07:10economic power precedes other kinds of power.
00:07:13If I have a high growth rate economy,
00:07:15that'll lead to the ability to invest more
00:07:18in a bigger military, bigger weapons,
00:07:20bit more advanced science, more advanced technology
00:07:22'cause just have more money to deploy.
00:07:24And so economic competition is a precursor
00:07:26for geopolitical competition.
00:07:29So when we say competing for this external power,
00:07:32we mean competing for GDP growth.
00:07:35But again, we're competing for GDP growth
00:07:37that doesn't mean what it used to mean.
00:07:39I think a lot of people think, okay, well,
00:07:40if GDP is going up by like 10%
00:07:42'cause AI is automating all this growth, that sounds awesome.
00:07:44- I was gonna say, like, increases in GDP
00:07:47are almost always a universal good thing.
00:07:49- They had been when it was humans that were generating that
00:07:52and then it was coming back to humans.
00:07:54- Because the revenue was going to be consolidated
00:07:57in a very small number of people.
00:07:58- In this new case, we have five companies that are--
00:08:01- There's no intermediary between.
00:08:03So who would be feeding the revenue in?
00:08:06'Cause this revenue still needs to come from somewhere,
00:08:08even if it goes to a small handful of people,
00:08:12where does the actual money come from?
00:08:14- Well, this is the confusing thing.
00:08:15What happens, how--
00:08:16- Is that a stupid question?
00:08:17- No, no, it's a good question.
00:08:18Because you're saying basically
00:08:20who's gonna be buying the products
00:08:22when no one has a job and no one has an income?
00:08:24- And on the route up to that, yeah.
00:08:26Fewer people have incomes and fewer people have jobs.
00:08:29The bucket being poured into the top.
00:08:32- That's right.
00:08:33- Is gonna stop being poured.
00:08:34- Yeah, yeah, this is the confusing and mind-breaking thing
00:08:39about AI and it just, in general,
00:08:41like I think people have to get used to,
00:08:42I mean, your podcast is called Modern Wisdom
00:08:44and I just think about this a lot.
00:08:45Like what are the wise capabilities that we need to have
00:08:49in order to make our way through this?
00:08:51And one of them is the ability to be with something
00:08:53that sounds like science fiction
00:08:55and realize that it's actually real.
00:08:58Like, and not say because it sounds like it's science fiction
00:09:01that I can just like dismiss it and say that can't be true.
00:09:04A lot of people do that.
00:09:05They're like AIs that are like breaking out
00:09:07of their container and hacking GPUs
00:09:10and mining crypto autonomously
00:09:11when no one told it to do that.
00:09:13That's gotta be like a made up study.
00:09:15But as we know, there was an Alibaba study just last week
00:09:19where the AIs autonomously broke out of their system
00:09:22and started mining crypto.
00:09:24- We need to round this out
00:09:25and then I wanna talk about that.
00:09:26- Sure, sure, sure.
00:09:28- That story is fucking terrifying.
00:09:30- Yeah, yeah.
00:09:31- So where does the economy, who's pouring money in?
00:09:34- I mean, the truth is that I don't know.
00:09:36I don't think anybody has an answer.
00:09:37- Is it just gonna grind to a halt at some point?
00:09:39- I think something like that, yeah.
00:09:40I mean, I don't think that there's,
00:09:43I think something that people need to get
00:09:44is it's not like there's a plan
00:09:46for how to make all this go well.
00:09:48Like this technology is being released
00:09:50in a paradigm undermining way.
00:09:52Like it's undermining the paradigm of economic assumptions
00:09:56and sort of societal assumptions
00:09:58that have made the post World War II order.
00:10:01This is such a deep fundamental change
00:10:03to the restructuring of everything.
00:10:07Our economic system, our relationships,
00:10:10our information environment.
00:10:12It's not just like adding a new technology in the mix.
00:10:14It's like fundamentally changing the structure
00:10:16of the entire world.
00:10:18You would think that if we're about to do that,
00:10:20we would do that with more careful,
00:10:22more caution, care, wisdom and restraint
00:10:25than we have with any technology we've ever deployed.
00:10:27If we knew we're about to undermine the paradigm,
00:10:29but because of this arms race dynamic,
00:10:31we are deploying it faster than we deployed
00:10:34any technology in history
00:10:35and therefore undermining these things faster
00:10:37than we can have a plan.
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